Original Author's Note

and now for something completely different.

Prompts

taser | whipping | waterboarding

Chapter 10: poor unfortunate souls

Nine days after the invasion, the screens turn back on. 

Bruce is in the sewers when it happens. It's not the hideout he would have picked, with Gotham a warzone, with rogues roaming the streets and every gang moving at once. It’s too small. It's too close to the surface. It has none of the cave's defenses—nothing but old metal doors, long-broken locks, and lead pipes to fend off Kryptonian eyes. 

But they need a place to hide. On his own, Bruce could probably stay ahead of the Crime Syndicate. They are not complicated people, and for all their displays of power, they have a lot of weaknesses. But it's not just him, and in the aftermath of an extra-dimensional invasion, every ally counts. 

"You got any… threes?" 

Stephanie Brown sits cross-legged on the bare floor, holding a sheaf of cards. Damian sits across from her on a crate, his splinted leg propped in front of him.

“No,” he says. 

“You gotta say it the right way,” Stephanie says.

“The stupid way,” Damian says under his breath. He wrinkles his nose. “Go… fish.”

“Damn.” Stephanie draws a card. 

“Language,” Bruce says, without looking up from his notebook. They’ve had to go old school, with all technology more complicated than a radio locked down. Even disconnected from the ethernet, their one computer screen blares a bright red message. 

THIS WORLD IS OURS. 

“How old are you?” Selina says, from her perch by the armory. Bruce doesn’t dignify that with an answer. 

“He’s ancient,” Stephanie says. “The bat-fossil, they call him.” 

“Sevens,” Damian says. 

“Shit, how’d you know?”

“Batgirl.” 

“Batman. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world’s pretty much ending—”

Then the computer screen turns from blank red to a moving image. Stephanie's voice stops. 

Bruce stares at the screen. He sees the Crime Syndicate, standing outside the fallen Watchtower. Ultraman. Superwoman. Owlman. The speedster is there too, a vicious grin spread across his face, but the fifth figure doesn’t look like—

Bruce goes still. He knows that face. Even bruised and swollen, he’d know it anywhere. 

Nightwing. Dick. He stands to the left of the group, naked from the waist up. His bare torso is wrapped in bandages. A bright golden lasso hangs from his neck and wrists. Superwoman holds the end of it. 

Ultraman floats forward. He tosses something—a few different objects—to the ground in front of him.

A bo staff. A red arrow. An S-shaped insignia. A feathered cape. 

“The so-called Teen Titans.” 

Ultraman’s voice rumbles. Even through speakers, it vibrates at a frequency human voices can’t reach. He makes no attempt to modulate it. 

“Last night, they attacked the Watchtower,” he says. “They were intercepted. The Teen Titans will not be a distraction to us any longer.” 

Static Shock. Speedy. Superboy. Bruce knows those weapons, those symbols. He knows which young heroes they belong to. He’s spoken to them. Trained them. Warned them of danger and encouraged them to fight. Virgil Hawkins. Mia Dearden. Kon-El.

Tim. 

Stephanie makes a short, choked noise. 

“They came here to help Nightwing,” Ultraman says. “So he will pay the price for their resistance.” He turns toward the prisoner, standing rigid under the lasso. 

Dick. Alive. Tim is—unaccounted for, missing in action, but Dick is there, on the screen, alive. Some part of Bruce is terribly grateful.

Now Owlman speaks. “The attack lasted thirty-two minutes,” he says. His deep growl makes Bruce’s lip curl in disgust. “That’s thirty-two lashes.” 

The speedster grins. “Seems fair to me.” 

“Batgirl,” Bruce says. He doesn’t look away. “Take Robin and check the perimeter.” 

On the screen, Owlman brandishes a whip. It looks ordinary. Bruce knows how much damage an ordinary whip can do. 

“I’m not a child,” Damian says. “I’ve seen a whipping before.” 

And you don’t need to see another one, Bruce thinks. And this is your brother. And it’s different. He doesn’t know how to say that. He doesn’t know how to make Damian listen. 

“That’s messed up, kid,” Selina says, which more or less sums it up. 

On the screen, the whip cracks. It lands on Dick’s back. He flinches. 

He stands still. He’s not tied to anything—he has nothing to hold him up—just the lasso, some twisted version of the Lasso of Truth, looped around his body. 

The whip cracks. Again. And again. Bruce finds himself counting. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Red lines snake across Dick’s back. 

The tenth time, Dick makes a noise. 

It’s short. Muffled. Not a scream, not a wail, but something worse. 

Owlman stops. 

He lets the whip drop to his side. He stalks forward to where Dick stands motionless. He leans in close—too close—and if he says something, the broadcast doesn’t pick it up. Bruce feels himself leaning forward and tears his eyes away. 

“Batgirl,” he snaps. “The perimeter.”

Stephanie stares at him. She doesn’t have her cowl. No one wants to wear their costume twenty-four hours a day, and no one wants to take their armor off completely. Damian hasn’t moved from his seat. He can’t move without crutches. He’s in no shape to do any kind of perimeter check. 

The whip cracks again. 

Eleven. 

“Don’t watch,” Bruce says. 

Damian glares at him. He opens his mouth to answer, hesitates, and closes it again. He doesn’t say anything. 

The whip falls again. And again. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. 

Dick screams. 

It’s a horrible noise. His voice strains and breaks, still muffled, like he can’t open his mouth all the way. Maybe he can’t. Bruce can’t see a gag, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t done something else—something worse—

Dick screams again. The whip falls. Bruce loses count. 

This is all there is. A whip cracking through the air, red lines on an already bruised back, muffled screams—and Dick stands still. Bruce can see him straining, his muscles twitching with the effort of staying upright. He won’t fall. They won’t let him fall. Whatever the lasso is doing to him, it’s keeping him in place, as the whip falls on him again and again and again—

And then it stops. 

Owlman turns away. He stares out from the screen. Bruce takes a jagged breath and tries to loosen his jaw. He tastes blood. 

“Let this be a lesson,” Owlman says. “Resistance will not be tolerated. There will be no mercy. Your heroes”—he pronounces the word with utter contempt—“will bear the punishment.” 

Bruce exhales. It’s over, he thinks, relieved and ashamed in equal measure. He hasn’t done anything. He’s safely hidden in the sewers of Gotham, while Dick suffers through sadistic torture. Dick is strong—one of the strongest people Bruce knows—but no one can survive that kind of treatment forever. He needs help. 

The last people who tried to help him are gone. 

“B,” Stephanie says. She puts a hand on his arm. She pulls—a suggestion, not a demand, asking him to look away. He’s still looking at the screen. Watching Dick. Silently, wordlessly begging him to be alright. To survive. 

It’s over, he thinks. For now, it’s over. For a little while longer, Dick will be fine. 

Then Owlman pulls out a taser. 

“Kory, no!”

Green light smashes through the laptop screen. Kory lowers her fist. Jason stares at her, wishing he didn’t feel the same rage in his own helpless body. 

“We must stop this.”

“We can’t,” Jason says. Past the ache in his throat that got worse every time he heard Dick scream. “Kory. You know we can’t.”

“You are a coward,” Kory spits. “I am not. If you will not do something to help your brother, I will.” 

“It’s not cowardice.” Jason’s spine prickles at the insult. A coward. After all they’ve been through together. “I’m being realistic. They took down the Justice League.” Took down, not killed, because Jason hasn’t seen any evidence that the League is really gone. A trident, a lasso, a cape—those can be stolen, those can be faked. And Jason knows better than most how mutable the binds of death really are. “We’re good, but we’re not the Justice League. We can’t beat them. And I’m not…” 

I’m not throwing my life away for Dick. That’s what he wants to say. Wants to spit it in Kory’s face so she turns her bright green rage on him. But it isn’t true. He knows that. He sees it in Kory’s face. 

“I’m not going in there,” he says, “just so Dick can watch me die.” 

Light stutters across the broken screen. The display is shattered, but the broadcast goes on. Dick screams again. The sound stretches across mangled speakers, overlapping itself, distending. Jason winces. 

“But it’s not just us.”

Roy’s voice is quiet. He stares at the broken laptop. He stares through it. “They didn’t get everybody. The—the Titans made it. For a while. There must be—” He breaks off. 

Roy knows Dick better than any of them. They were heroes together, before Kory came to Earth, before Jason lost his parents. They were friends before Jason or Kory even met Dick. 

A faint buzzing noise. Dick screams again. 

“X’Hal,” Kory murmurs. “They will kill him.”

They won’t, Jason thinks. They won’t give up their whipping boy that easily. 

“If we could find them,” Roy starts. He looks at Jason. “The others—there has to be someone left. They could help us, we could help them—”

“All we’d do is give them another excuse,” Jason says.

“They’re doing it anyway!” Roy’s voice breaks. “They’re hurting him. Because they can. It doesn’t matter if they have an excuse. They’ll do it anyway.” He looks away. There are tears in his eyes. 

Kory curses in Tamaranean. 

The laptop buzzes with something that might be a voice. There are no more screams. After a few seconds, the shattered screen turns red again. 

“They weren’t all on the Watchtower,” Roy says. “Connor wasn’t. Emiko wasn’t. Donna and Garth—”

“Are out of contact,” Jason says. “Even if we could contact them, which we can’t, that’s, what? A couple of archers? An Atlantean?”

“And an Amazon,” Kory says. 

“Against the most powerful people on Earth,” Jason says. “Two Earths. Is that how you want to die?”

“Is this how you want to live?” 

Jason shifts on his feet. Roy meets his eyes, staring through him like he stared through the shattered screen. He doesn’t say anything else. 

He doesn’t have to.